#708 - Bryan Caplan - Is Feminism Changing For The Worse?

26:42I'm not gonna repeat Scott's answer, but I definitely did Haslow about that. See, how about we go down more to like 5 % from 98? Could we do that? Look, so here's the thing that I think is the inevitable ping pong game that occurs happening. And I saw this with Melissa Karni, who came on the podcast recently. She wrote a book called The Two Parent Privilege, How America Stop Getting Married and Started Falling Behind Something Like That. She is a policy wonk from Washington, DC, and I tried in the episode to push her beyond just what is the data telling us to, what is the implication and maybe even what is the cause of this?

27:19Like, what's it? Give me the mechanism. Why is it the case? What is happening developmentally amongst the children? And she was very tentative, right? You know, she's written this big book about things, but she very much kind of defined the rules of play of where she wasn't going to get out over her skis with regards to this. And I was like, that's like a, I wish that she just just bro science to way through stuff because it's funny, but what she did was she decided I'm gonna hold myself within this sort of within my realm of expertise. And I was like, that's a pretty good indication of somebody that's acting in good faith with a lot of experts and trying to be really, really accurate with what they say.

27:54Since she's released it, she has been slammed online, absolutely slammed. And what I've seen, although I don't think that this is gonna happen to her, I've seen someone who is probably on a political compass test center left, certainly somebody who wrote a book to try and reduce inequality between class groups. This is exactly exacerbating the precise inequality that we don't want to have happened and so on and so forth. And it was written as far as I can see with a good amount of compassion, but I'm seeing the exact mechanism by which many people become radicalized to one side or another side of some sort of aisle, because they think, well, I mean, if I guess the only people that are ever going to listen to me about the woes that I have, about the justified or sometimes unjustified antipathy or self -pity that I've got, well, I'm going to go with the group that accepts me.

28:46I'm not going to keep on, you know, trying to work. Here's 98 % of my entire world going toward you, group that says that you despise me and I'm entitled more on in -sell or something like that. So I'm the rapist for like a rapist in his heart. It's like straight out of the New Testament. Original sin. So yeah, just my point being that, you know, I see here, especially the antipathy, it creates this ever escalating cycle that spins up and up and up and up and people become more virulent in their distaste and their lack of ability to see the other sides issue. And this is how you have, you know, two groups of people largely just talking past each other.

29:26Yeah, I mean, I only think about what Scott Alexander calls the gray tribe, and this is the which he admits it's still a tribe, but it's a tribe with different norms and better norms that's trying to not actually fall into being either of the either the blue tribe or the red tribe as we call them confusingly here in the US. Obviously, so with every other country in the world red equals left, but somehow in the US red equals right. You got the wrong way around. Yes. And then blue, I don't know the what it's like to the right of the road that you drive on, you got it the wrong way around. Yes, but where do you know, I think like we're at least close to the only hunter that has this color scheme, but yeah, but anyway, yeah, so that's you face quite a lot of sense.

30:05I mean, you're mentioning then, you know, the Scott Ayrinson reaction to this was just to write a piece defend or excuse me, the Scott Alexander reaction was to write a piece standing up for Scott Ayrinson and saying, yes, like there is this group of shy mill nerds who want to talk to women, they're not very good at it. It doesn't mean that they have any horrible, anything any horrible plans. So they're usually very nice people. It's just that they don't really know how to talk to women. The only way to learn is to try it and not be very good at it at first. So can't you go and cut them some slack?

30:37I think it's totally reasonable point. You had an idea about why we all get accused of being pick pockets. Hold on to that. Right. This was specifically a reference to the humiliation of mandatory training that happens here at universities a lot. So, you know, like imagine if there was some kind of mandatory pick pocket training where they bring in all the workers and they say, pick pocketing is wrong. Don't pick pocket others. Pick pocketing others means reaching into their pockets without remission and taking their stuff and then keeping it. Don't be a pick pocket. All right. And it's like, okay, why are you telling me this though?

31:18Like, I know all this already. This is all quite obvious. And yet to me, this is very much what most sensitivity training is like, what's most of the training about, you know, like, internet security is like, they're telling you a bunch of totally obvious stuff. And even why? Well, a lot of it is, it really just seems to be, who milliate you to say, Look, we're going to talk to you like children and you have to sit there and suck it up. Tough luck. Some of it is for legal purposes where if they get sued, they can say, we told them not to do it. Right? As if the main reason people pick pocket is they don't, they know whenever told them not to do it or they don't understand what would constitute it.

31:56Although another part of it is ratcheting up the definitions so that almost anything counts as pick pocketing where it's like, well, you looked at what was in someone's pocket without their consent. That's a kind of pick pocketing. So I think that's also what's going on. And once you have your training set up, they do often start having higher and higher standards. Now I say this is to go and make fun of various training that you'll see especially in college campuses about sexual harassment. So like, don't sleep with your students. Oh, I didn't know we weren't supposed to do that. Oh, thank you.

32:28I was like, come on. Like we all know this. I mean, the reason why people are doing it isn't because they aren't aware of the rules, the reason they're doing it is because They don't like the rules and the rules are stopping them from knowing what they want. So, if it really an issue of something that's really confusing, be a different story. So, maybe actually the internet security, at least you might think that that's more complicated. Although honestly, having gone through internet security training, I'll say that the stuff they train you on is so basic because honestly, they need to make a test that can be passed by the lowest IQ person in the organization.

33:04And therefore, it can't really be hard because otherwise they'd have to fire people over failing their IT tests to try to do IT training over over over time. It makes sense. So one of the things that we're both fans of is agency, trying to give people a sense of personal agency, individual sovereignty. It seems to me, and I hadn't thought of these two words before, but it seems like antipathy and pity, are, yeah, self -pity in the pity for others. Antipathy and self -pity are probably about as close to solvents for agency as possible. Like it will dissolve your ability to feel like an agentic individual.

33:41Oh yeah, that's a great point. I mean, yeah, because like, well, what I like to tell people is, imagine a person who has the absolute maximum reason to feel on the tip of the in self -pity. Like someone who was stabbed in the back and now they're paralyzed and they know the person who did it, you know, like it, I don't know, it was like your ex -wife stab you in the back, now you're paralyzed from the neck down for the rest of your life. So you have every reason to hate this person, every reason to feel sorry for yourself. And the question is, if you wanted to help this person, would you go to them and say, be full of antivathy, be full of self -pity?

34:15Of course not. You'd be trying to go and come up with some story to make them feel better. And it's like, well, okay, I get like, I understand why you would be overwhelmed with antivating self -pity, but you got to get past that because if you're going to have any enjoyment out of life, if you're going to be able to salvage any part of what you're hoping for, you're going to have to go and focus on what you can do and what you can have now and just being angry at the woman who did this to you and feeling sorry for you, though completely justified, is totally unconstructive. What would you say then, given that we have an incredibly broad number of people who are wallowing in a low agency existence?

34:57What's your prescription philosophically or tactically or strategically for getting someone from antipathy and self -pity into agency. The movie, what about Bob? Actually, the lead psychologist in it has a book called Baby Steps about how someone who has problems needs to give up on the idea of solving them all overnight and instead just try to take small little steps and improvement. The character is mock worthy in the movie, but I think it's totally sensible. If a person is having trouble with life, don't say, fix everything overnight to say, all right, let's take some small steps and move from there.

35:35So that's what I would be in by doing. I mean, in terms of philosophy, I say that philosophically it's easier to go and just realize a philosophy is wrong than to get rid of all the negativity that the philosophy has inspired. You know, just the very fact that you decide the philosophy is incorrect, doesn't mean you won't, you'll stop feeling bad about the things the philosophy taught you to feel bad about. But still, I would say, all right, well, just, you know, next time that you are feeling bad about this, remember, like, there's a philosophy that originally got me feeling bad about this, the philosophy's wrong.

36:08So now try to go and rethink the situation from a different point of view, I would say that as well. I mean, also, I honestly, I would just say, don't hang out. Well, like another good baby step is, hang out more with people who do not feel so much centipity in self -pity, so that your new peer group is encouraging you to improve instead of holding you back. Yeah, I think the story that you tell yourself about why you're feeling bad, and what does it mean that I feel bad, and what is the story that I tell myself about that? This kind of recursive narrative game that you play with yourself probably counts for a big chunk of the discontent and the pain that you feel, right?

36:51Yeah, you have the situation, but then you have these layers of guilt and shame and doubt and self -esteem or lack thereof that you layer on top. And I think that is where the philosophical worldview comes in quite importantly. Is this happening to me? Did I get to choose this? There's a study which I'm sure you've seen about two rats are in wheels, one rat runs, and when it runs, the other rat has to run. the one rat that runs gets all of the benefits from exercise and the rat that has to run gets all of the downsides from stress. The point being that being able to take your sense of control, your locus of control being internal is a very, very large part of life.

37:33And I mean, what's interesting about that to me is that I actually have a moderate locus control because I just think it's true that luck is important in life. I, you know, so I realized that it would probably be psychologically better for me to have the false belief that there's no luck, but I just think that such an insane view that I'm not going to so blind myself to the fact, well, you kind of got lucky making this friend of that right at that time. And it's, you know, you could have lasted by your own rationality. Yeah. Yeah. So, but you know, like, it's also like, you just be really positive about the things that you can change, focus on those.

38:07You don't need to tell yourself a big lie in order to motivate yourself to say, look, but there's a lot of stuff that's in my power and I'm gonna do that stuff. This has remind me of one of my favorite movies. I hope this isn't giving away spoilers, but it's so obscure that I just doubt that anyone would watch it anyway, but it's called The Upside of Anger and The Basic Plot. And have you ever seen it by any chance? No. The basic plot is that there is a dad of, there's a family, there's a mom and dad, and I think it's four daughters, and the dad runs off of the secretary and just disappears and abandons the entire family and the mom becomes a terrible at raging alcohol.

38:43I can see she just hates the world. She's so mad. And then there's the interaction we do her and the daughters on and on. And then at the end of the movie, they discover that it is not true the father ran away or banded them. The father just fell into a ditch and died. And yet, and nothing to do with the secretary or anything else. And then you just realize, wow, you learn a fact. And then you suddenly realize all this anger that I had is just wrong, just predicated on a totally false story of the world. And in watching the movie, you can almost instantly see people saying, like, I don't feel angry anymore because my anger was based upon a story that is false.

39:22Now, I don't think that just abandoning a whole philosophy of life is going to make it quite as easy to feel good as that one very particular sense of betrayal. But, you know, like really in the story, it's very psychologically credible that the anger just gets replaced with a sense of horrible guilt that how could I have so wrongly judged this person who actually was loyal to his family the whole time and had an accident. So I swear this makes sense in my mind. Let's see if it makes sense in public. I went to dinner with RFK Jr. about three months ago when he was in Austin. There was a bunch of different people, there, there's a lot of interesting people.

40:01One of them was Tim Kennedy, who's a green beret, he might know he lives in Austin. He does a sort of self defense thing called sheep dog response. Tim Kennedy was open carrying as he does because that's that's these are ex - Wait, do you say Tim Kennedy? Yes. So wait, is he is he also a Kennedy? Actually different different Kennedy. I was getting confused by the story. You had to fight a green beret anyway, but unrelated to the Kennedy family. Precisely correct. All of RFK juniors security was outside. He had some staff in with him, but it was a lady PR person and maybe an assistant of some kind and some other stuff.

40:39He had no security inside, tons outside, right? But no security inside. And I would remember looking at the gun on Tim's hip and thinking, if he pulled that gun out now and shot RFK junior in the head, his entire career would be gone back over with the tooth comb to work out exactly the moment when he became a Russian sleeper agent. and oh, it was that UFC fight that they did in Abu Dhabi when secretly the Saudi prince met him backstage and that was when they changed him. And every podcast he's ever done would be reanalyzed bit by bit, he did this series called Finding Hitler, searching for Hitler or whatever.

41:15Oh, the reason he did that was to get into Argentina because that's where they've got. And what I realized was like individual actions can cause retroactively for the entire story to be re -changed. And it's almost like the same as what you're talking about, right? that his entire life would have been looked at in a different manner. So yeah, I totally see how that's the case. One of the things I guess to just round out this sort of agency part that I think would be interesting to find out from you is if somebody is or somebody has a friend that is struggling with the self -pity and the antipathy and the externalised locus of control, overly externalised locus of control, what have you found anything that is a good salve for that that can kind of start to give people a little bit of perspective, like you can enact change in your life.

42:00There are things that you can do. This isn't just happening to you. Is there anything philosophically that you find yourself relying on if you end up getting too close to antipathy and self -pity? I think much more often about how to make people feel happier with their lives and how to raise their locusts of control. So, normally what I tell them is, look, the most important cause of human happiness or unhappiness is whether you're spending a lot of time with people's company you enjoy. Now that itself comes down to Locust control. Like, well, I am with, I am stuck with people whose company I don't enjoy.

42:32And I said, well, like, you're not really stuck with them. Like you may say you're stuck with them, but you could go and try, you know, like, you'll, like, go through your mental role. Dex, the people who already know, aren't there some people that you like more that you don't spend much time with? And could you try to spend more time with them? Some people that you like less and you could just turn down the dial a bit. You don't need to start purging your grandma because she has a big mouth. You could just see her half as often. But I would think of that as actually itself, you know, definitely touching on Locust control because you're telling them to go and take, you know, take actions in order to go and make, and make them sell happier.

43:07So I guess I would probably start there. In terms of just saying, looking at focus on things that you can do that will improve your life and things that you can do, don't focus on what you can't do. I think that's all totally reasonable. I mean, I recently did two really popular posts, one on advice for men on finding their soulmate and the other one on advice for women on finding their soulmate. I think if you go through, a lot of it is basically saying, like, you know, exert more locus control. Right? So, you know, like, there's a lot of things you can do and these are some of the easiest steps you can take in order to make what you want to happen happen.

43:42But yeah, if you just sit there saying, like, poor me, then, yeah, nothing's going to happen. Of course, you know, at least, almost certainly, you can just wait to be saved. Someone said, Oh, I'm going to save you. What were the important differences between men finding decimal mate and women finding nestel mate? Let's see. Good one. I think for both groups, I said, put less weight on physical attractiveness, although I think for men, I said, it's especially important for them to put less weight on that. And I said, look, just consider this thought experiment. Imagine you're married to a super model, which he is a terrible personality.

44:14How do you feel about your life? Like everyone's Yeah, terrible. I mean, I even said imagine you start dating a supermodel, but she's a terrible personality. How long does it take before you are miserable? And yeah, like three weeks. So all right. Well, I think you already agree with my point. It's just a matter of exerting the self -control to focus on personality over looks, which I think, you know, both genders do it, but it's especially bad for men. See, for, for both genders, I was telling them things like figure out these top priorities and then just down weight everything else to be flexible and everything else.

44:50For women, I did have this advice of just go older. So, just go 5 or 10 years older especially because a very common complaint for women is men my age or so immature. Alright, well, they don't have to be your age. They could be 5 years older. And you could go and find an immature guy and then hope to change him and he'll turn out and become mature guy. But a lot of guys never become mature. If you get an older guy, you can say, well, is he mature already? No, in that case, no. And if he is great, I don't have to speculate about his future maturity because it's already there. Now, someone says, look, I can't possibly do that.

45:23It's too gross. It's like, well, what's the most you're willing to do? Yeah, that's cool. Yeah, I see an awful lot of the complaints from women who are struggling to find men that they think is sufficiently mature at their age. And you see this in, it seems to be tied up in the data that there is a significantly bigger portion of 18 to 30 men who are single than 18 to 30 women who are single. So I think women have already largely cotton on to this. Again, it fixes the tall girl problem of women out earning men's social economically because age is one of the biggest predictors of wealth and if wealth is something that you need to offset, all right, we'll just give him a seven year head start and there he is.

46:02He's out ahead of you. Yeah, I mean, I think like another big difference, I said, well, so for men, I said, look, you just have to get over your lack of confidence and ask. Right, so that's important. Anybody about it? For women, what I said is, look, it's true that you don't have to ask in order to get dates, but you do need to ask to get the guy you want probably. So I said, you know, for women just to get a little bit more flexible on being willing to go and ask. And I think for them, I said, look, if you just feel tongue tied, you're like, especially for women just telling you that you seem promising.

46:34Like, oh my God, like, I hate you now. Like, you told me I seem promising. say like it's on the one hand, be like it is far from throwing yourself at a guy, but same time, it is unambiguous. I think I also mentioned the sense of, it's always obvious what the other person wants. So there's no need for me to tell them. Or it's always obvious what I want rather. There's no need to tell them, like just forget that nonsense. People are not mind readers. We so greatly overrate other people's ability to read us because we're always thinking what we're thinking. but we never get inside anyone else's head.

47:08I know the idea that everyone secretly knows what it is you're thinking and they're just playing dumb. Especially if you're talking about the opposite sex, especially if you're talking about the opposite sex. We have no idea how the inside of your mind works. I had a... Oh, we got some idea, but... I had a bunch of advice I was throwing around for a while about receptivity from women. So a lot of women still have... They feel like there is an additional lowering in status if they make the first move. But does this story, you'll have heard of dropping a handkerchief that the ladies would have done in the Renaissance period, and the aristocracy would drop a handkerchief, the gentleman would pick it up, and that would be the beginning of the conversation.

47:46Like the modern equivalent of that is a gaze that lingers a little bit too long. Also, women need to kind of adjust the sights of whatever they're shooting with to account for me too, and men's concern that they're going to make a woman feel uncomfortable. So there's an awful lot of sort of moving, moving, moving parts here. One of the other things that I quite enjoy. before you move on. So one of my big piece of advice to my daughter is never be afraid to play the I'm not one of those feminist cards with men. Oh, yes. I. Okay. And again, this is one really, of course, like, you know, I knew a lot of people would get it, get it angry about it.

48:19But I said, look, I'm not saying to go and to announce women or otherwise I'm saying, look, just put people at ease. If someone is nervous, it is common sense and strategically wise just to go and smile and just say, it's all cool. Don't worry, I'm a decent person. I don't prejudge you as being bad. And I think that the, I'm not one of those feminist cards is one of the best ones for women to play. It really does distinguish you from women that men just feel like they have to walk on eggshells around to one where they will talk to you freely. I just great for work, great for dating, great for me for actually making friends.

48:55I mean, the only thing that's holding people back is loyalty to this philosophical dogma. Why do you think there's been a demonization of having children over the last few years? It feels like this is kind of tied into a lot of feminist meta -meams and meta -cultures that's going on. We've seen a decline in fertility rates. What do you think is going on with this demonization of specifically having kids? I think that the demonization comes from a very narrow corner of mostly the internet. The real story is not so much demonization as just apathy and disinterest. It is true there is a demonization corner.

49:35My younger son reads reddit all the time and he's saying, okay, dad, the child -free people, they're not that bad. But the anti -natalists, they're crazy. The anti -natalists, the people who post videos of kids getting trampled by horses and stuff like that and like, what? But I am familiar with philosophical anti -natalism. I mean, it really does seem to heavily flow from the work of South African philosopher David Benatar. And he came up with this argument that to my mind is truly bizarre. You know, like he has a number of arguments, but the hardcore argument comes down to no one consents to be born because they can't because don't exist yet.

50:15And everyone who exists will experience some suffering. And even if that suffering is overwhelmingly outweighed by joy, still, like it is wrong to ever inflict suffering on anyone without their consent. And therefore, it's always wrong to have kids. And this argument has persuaded a strangely large number of people to my mind. And my reply to this is, so this implies the good Samaritan is evil because you can't like how do you know that unconscious just guy doesn't want to die. You're going in administering first aid to a man who was beaten in desenselessness, but how do you know that he doesn't want to just bleed out?

50:52It's like, well, there is this philosophical doctrine called hypothetical consent, which normally is bogus because we can just ask you whether you consent. But it is custom made for cases where like, well, he would probably consent if he was conscious, but he can't. Similarly, you would probably consent to be born or to be conceived if you could, but can't, but it's reasonable to resume it. Then there is a broader category of people to think that life isn't worth living. Epicurus answered this 2 ,500 years ago, and his reply just consisted in, well, we're in Greece. There's cliffs. Don't like it, jump off.

51:29I have gotten, I got a threatening email from my university's mental health office for promoting suicide for saying stuff like this. It's like, I'm not, do you even understand what your university is about? It's about thinking about things. It's not, like if that counts as promoting suicide to say Epicurus said something and it's a good argument, I don't know what you're doing on a university campus. I'm familiar with Benatar. One of my friends is podcasted with him, albeit when he didn't have his screen on because he's still pseudonymous or largely anonymous or whatever. Really? Anybody who's known as a philosopher, so...

52:08No one knows his face, I don't think. We teach us at a university, I can't even know his face. I don't know if he teaches under his real name. I don't know whether that's a pseudonym. I might be wrong, anyway. Okay, well, anyway. So, you can check it for the show notes. Even if we step ourselves a little bit away from the hardcore anti -natalist philosophers, again, you could maybe call it a generalized anti -children culture, right? and this is more toward the ambiguity that you mentioned about having kids, this hyper individualism. Where do you think that comes from? I mean, I think feminism definitely has something to do with it, especially the idea that any woman that thinks that raising kids should be her first priority as an adult is just stupid and foolish and is sort of being a doormat to the patriarchy.

52:55I mean, it's striking to me that if there were a girl today in especially suburban high school who said I just want to be a mom. I think that like the outcry against that would be overwhelming. Not because they hate the idea of having kids, but because they elevate the idea of having a career as being the most important thing in life and the kid as being an optional thing. And I would think of these are two, both two extremely important things in life. And yeah, there's a trade -off, of course. As a homeschooling dad who actually did all the night shifts for all four of my kids, I can say, yeah, I probably would have one or two more books if I didn't know kids.

53:30But I chose to be less successful as a professor so that I could go and have kids because that was more important to me and still is. So there's a big, there's a big, mimetic element going on here with regards to children. So that's totally true. I think that is a separate point. But yes, to a large degree, I mean, it leads them, I mean, medically in terms of imitating other people.

53:58There's a Shild, the number of children that you want to have is based fairly heavily upon just what's normal in your culture or subculture So that's you know one major factor going on which means you can sort of get a multiply you can get a multiplied effect Where if women's to women there's let's say women are focusing more on their careers That has a direct effect reducing fertility, but it also is the indirect effect of it's now normal to have fewer kids Which then means that even people are not focused on their careers want to go and fit in I have worked quite a bit with the actual data of fertility and especially deciding, but I think both accomplished and desired fertility and what's, you know, so like two big lessons that I like to trump it.

54:41So one is at least in American data, it is not true that income by itself leads to lower fertility. In fact, income by itself leads to higher fertility. really what's going on is that education leads to lower fertility and so and if you race education against income you see that education reduces fertility and income increases it and the basic upshot of this is that the most fertile people are high income low education groups like say plumbers and on the other hand the least fertile groups are high education low income like say philosophers who drive a taxi. Alright, so that's it. And once you put it this way, you realize, hmm, so it isn't really the material element.

55:24It's more of the social element of education. If we actually were teaching kids in school, things like babies are, babies are gross, babies are terrible. David Benatar has the right argument. I don't know of any school that really does that. It's more of you just teach people other priorities as being overwhelming importance. And then just like with problems, if you talk about one problem all the time, you are implicitly saying other problems don't matter. And if you talk about only one life goal is being important all the time, you're implicitly saying other life goals don't matter. The other result that I think is very, well, let's see, it's not surprising, but it's really we're saying because it's kind of thing people wouldn't want to say without data, but I do have the data.

56:07It's that women's education, women's income are much more important for determining the outcomes than the men's education income. For both genders, it's got the same direction. But basically, it looks very much like women's preferences are a lot more important for the outcome, which comes down to something like women have an actual definite opinion about how many kids they want to have. Men are more along for the ride. And like, oh, you want to have three kids? Great. You want to have one kid, great. It's not quite that men don't have any preference at all and don't bargain or don't select. But it really is more of the kind of decision that women, women dominate and within the family is how many kids are we going to have?

56:51Right. So, in terms of getting fertility up, you've got to change women's minds. That's more important, generally. A high -income man married to a medium -low education woman might be able to get this moving a little bit. Oh, yeah. I mean, you know, by the way, I also in my advice for men and women, I say like, you know, find out on the kids they want early. Maybe not the first date, but say by the third date, like it's important thing to know. Yeah. Yeah. The social desirability bias is something that I learned from you that you said is the most underrated effect in all of psychology. And I kind of can't stop seeing it now.

57:33Good. Explain it to people that aren't familiar. Simple idea. When the truth sounds bad people lie. And often the truth, the truth is said sufficiently and frequently, people stop even being conscious about lying. I mean, really mundane examples are things like M .I. fat. There's only one acceptable answer to that. Oh, Brian, you look great. You're wonderful. You're beautiful the way you are. We can see this in lots of different areas. You can see it in things like church attendance. More people claim they went to church than actually went to church. More people claim to vote than actually vote.

58:04One of my favorite examples of all is there's actually a study of first of all, you ask people, would you abort a down syndrome fetus? And only about, I think like 20, 25 % of people say they would, but then we see what happens when people are actually in that situation and then it's more like 90%. All right. Now again, this doesn't necessarily mean that people were truly lying, but they were just blurting out what sounded good without thinking about it until they needed to actually make a decision. And then suddenly it's no longer just words, I've gone, oh my god, like I don't want to do that.

58:39Stan, did you reveal preference as a hell of a drug? Oh, yes, that's quite right. Now I have a lot of applications of this. Some again as mundane as the strange language of want to come to my party on Saturday. Oh, I can't. I said, hmm, will you be in a cage? Will you be in the middle of Siberia? I'm able to get to a plane in time? What do you mean you can't? And the answer is right, fine. I don't want to is the truth. I say I can't and know because that sounds better even though it is actually literally correct. I won't. Yes, I won't. I don't want to be given to my body. I won't. I won't. Yes, I won't.

59:17Why not? Because I have some other things to do that would be better than that for me. Like what is that like sitting no watching TV that's better. Yeah, drop in the answer But then I say there are many areas of life where Socialized ability bias just becomes silverwhelmingly. It's almost the only thing going on So I encourage people just to go and first of all Read any political speech by politician. They don't like and just go through the sentences one by one and say like could this possibly be literally true And I think you'll find wow like the politicians I don't like or lying all the time.

59:50When Plutifact goes and says Trump lies like 70 % of the time, like, no, 99 .9 % is the correct number because you just read the sentence and it'll be, and the sentence is, it'll be things like, we're doing everything possible for this. No you aren't. If you're doing everything possible, you spend zero on anything else. So no, wrong, false. And obviously so, therefore, a lie. Is that not a part of just the imprecision of language and the fact that when we speak, there is a degree of like whimsy that comes along for the ride. Interesting question. Yeah, many people say, well, everybody knows it's not meant to be literally true.

1:00:25I say actually, it's the kind of thing where I think the politicians are playing on the ambiguity of maybe it's literally true, maybe it's not. If they say, this is an existential risk, that's Putin's story about why they have to invade Ukraine. It's an existential risk, homerad. All right. And it's like, hmm, now, you know, like when people hear this is everyone role is ever there are all the supporters saying, well, obviously it's not really existential, but so like he's saying that you get people's attention. Or there are a whole lot of people who are actually believing it just like it's the truth from God's mouth.

1:00:57And I think actually in politics, there's a lot of people who are just taking it very naively. And so I do think it is a problem. I think that it's not merely that you have to double the rhetoric to get the same result that you would have gotten. if everyone spoke honestly, I think rather there are just a lot of things that government does that if people were honest, just wouldn't exist. You know, like a people and gering COVID were to say, look, rather than saying, look, we're doing this to keep people safe. They said, we're doing this in order to reduce the number of atalities from one million to 950 ,000.

1:01:30I think there just be a lot less support for the measures if you're if you were that honest about it. It, well, that fundamentally comes down to, is it useful or is it true? right? There are things that you can say that are useful, that things that are true, that become less useful. And you go, okay, well, what's the point of this communication? Is it to communicate the truth or is it to get the intended outcome? Yes, although what soon as someone starts doing that, then it's like, what useful for who? Useful for you to get power and hold it. Hmm, I wonder if that's something politicians care about.

1:01:59As opposed to getting the best overall result for society, doing careful cost benefit analysis after collecting the best possible statistics we could find. Even that though all the way down still ends up with lexical semantic fuckery and you know just it's trademark lexical semantic fuckery you heard it here first Because what people then start to do is they make lies of omission rather than lies of commission They purposefully obfuscate not using words that allow them to be held up. It's what happens in law courts It's so and so forth. Well, I didn't say You can't prove that it's necessarily not the case that precisely.

1:02:36It's possible that. It just becomes a game of plausible deniability. So I think this is kind of the equivalent of the justification for a performance enhancing drugs, the legitimized, the limpics. I think just let the gloves come off and lie as much as you want. Don't ever hold anybody 20 a cat and just let it become a neuro -linguistic programming soup and just see who can make the best lies all the way down and let's see who wins then. Yeah, I like I confess to some slight emotional sympathy, but I think that you know if you just look at the world and to see like you know the very worst governments in the world are the have the biggest line demagogues.

1:03:14Part of this I'll say is because we though these are almost always dictators the dictators just get away with bigger lies. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, assuming you're like, you know, there are just so many fun applications of social desirability bias. One of my favorites actually is understanding what is the point of propaganda. I'm a huge or well fan and if you read or well, it sounds like the whole point of propaganda is just to tell, you know, it's basically to obscure the actual truth and we're basically to crush the truth or you know, assuming you're not probably got a censorship rather, censorship.

1:03:47So you read or well, it sounds like the whole point of censorship is that the government want to crush the truth because they know that in the contest between the truth and a lie, the lie will be defeated so they have to go and imprison anyone who speaks the truth. Nice story. But here's the thing, if you go and look at dictatorships, say that they spend a lot more time crushing other lies than they do crushing the truth. They go to Saudi Arabia. They're not that worried about the atheist saying, like how do we know that the Quran is even true?

1:04:21They're a law ordains me. Those are the people that put fear into the hearts of a Middle East or an Islamist tyrant because that person is saying a competing lie. So the title that says, you know, monopolize the pretty lies, point of censorship is say, only I get to tell ridiculous lies. Anyone who says any other lies, I will kill you. I certainly think I remember Rob Henderson writing something about the goal of propaganda is not to control what you think, it's to convince you of what other people think. So it's basically a game of you will through the Abilene paradox and through memetic desire and through social desirability bias and so on.

1:05:01You will end up doing what you think other people think. So the goal is not actually to change your mind. It's to change your mind about what you think other people are thinking. Probably both, but it's a good point. Yeah, you know the Abilene paradox. It sounds really familiar, but really good. I learned about it last week and now I can't shoot up. It's one where everybody is sort of like the Canes beauty contest where you're trying to figure out what other people will think, whoever other people will think is the most beautiful person. Two degree yet. The Abilene paradox is a situation in which a group makes a decision that is contrary to the desires of the group's members because each member assumes the others approve of it.

1:05:38It explains how a number of accurate individuals can be comedied so when they get together. Think Empress new clothes. And equate and invites you to his wedding, despite not wanting you there because he thinks he wants to attend. You attend, despite not wanting to, because you think he wants you there. At a business meeting, someone suggests an idea of making the influence of the face of the brand or a trans influencer. Each member has misgivings about this, but assumes that the others will consider them transfer if they speak out. So everyone approves the idea, despite no one liking it, or basically all of North Korea.

1:06:05Yes. Right. Right. I strongly suspect that you've got 5 % or 10 % true believers in North Korea at least. Yes, I think that you know, I mean, I also have no doubt that if you open the border of South Korea, a large majority of the population would leave very quickly. Yeah. Yeah, you had this other tweet that I loved from a while ago, dear intellectuals, if you ever decide you've been deeply wrong for yours, don't instantly rebrand yourself as a wise spokesperson for your new view. Instead, publicly admit that your judgment clearly is not very good and stop pontificating for a few years. Why? Yeah.

1:06:42It is inspired by a few particular people who are main nameless who did this bizarre transformation from I'm start off as the world's expert on this view and now that views totally wrong and stupid. Now I'm the expert on the other view like well if it's totally wrong and stupid, what does that say about the fact that you held it for 10 years? I mean I just think that you again it's a lot while it's logically possible that a person could just see through the errors and become incredibly thoughtful about a new view. I just think that it's highly unlikely and this is more of someone has either fame or money or both on the line and therefore they can't actually go through this honest period of contrition where they decide, gee, like I can be that wrong.

1:07:24What would be a hypothetical example of someone doing this? Hmm. I mean, one of my favorite ones is all of the rabbits downists who de -converted and then quickly claimed to be the leading spokesman for anti -communism. This is a big deal in the 40s and 50s. A Whitaker Chamber comes to mind as one example. Let's see who else Sydney Hook. Let's see, there's a bunch of other ones. Let's see. I mean, you think Max Eastman as well. So, you basically, he was a troskiist, but anyway. They spend years going and acting like Joseph Stalin is a savior of mankind. And then it's like, oh, but turns out he's a horrible mass murderer.

1:08:05Whoops. Okay. Now I'm going to go and tell everybody how to be an anti -communist. I mean, on the one hand, like if you have specific things you've observed, then fine. Say, like, I actually saw the killing fields. So listen to me. I was, but on the other hand, to say, but now I'm the expert on how anti -communism should work. No, I think we should probably listen to people who never thought it was a good idea and were a press conference. I mean, I will say that I am, I especially have it out for Whitaker Chambers. who wrote a totally unfair review of Iron Rands Atlas Shrug. Here's someone who hated communism from her teenage years when she first encountered it.

1:08:40Never had a good word to say about it. I think at a lot of insightful things to say about a horrible it was and then Whitaker Chambers has the nerve to call her a fascist in his review for National Review. It's like that guy. I mean, I just wanna say, you know what? You see, there's a reason it became a stoneist, which is that you don't have a correct attitude about how to think about ideas and how to treat other human beings. It's the sort of performative empathy or I guess social desirability by a sort of wrapped up in a world where your words are more important than your deeds, which they certainly are now, but they are basically at any distance, right?

1:09:17Because we can't see what you're doing, but we can read what you wrote or hear what you're saying. And yeah, this has got spun up so much more recently where you see Lizzo is supposed to be this champion for bigger -bodied women, but it turns out that she's fat -shaming all of her dances backstage and making the meat bananas out of the vaginas of Amsterdam strippers, Ellen DeGeneres. I have no knowledge of any of this. I'll take your word for it. I promise you it's true. I promise you there's videos out there. Yet my point being that it's often the people that proclaim the loudest about a thing that are the ones that are the worst people committing that particular misgiving.

1:10:04Right. This reminds me of a couple of other essays that I have. I have one called, you know, Could Such A Man Care? And it just starts with, all right, you go on you here, the official, this special speech is of Kim Jong -un or Maduro. And it's all about how I'm such a great compassionate person. I love the people. I have the poor. I'm a champion. And at the current stage in their career, you're like, yeah, sure, we know what you're really doing, what you're up to. But then you go back in time and realize there was some earlier period when they didn't have power and they couldn't really go and do horrible things, but they were still going and expressing the same ideas.

1:10:37Kim Jong -un is not a good example because he's born into this, but Maduro is a perfectly fine example. But anyone who starts off as a non -politician and activist and then they eventually get it, you can go and find what they originally saying and say, all right, well, one reaction as well, obviously, they were really corrupted by power, whatever. But you know, my reaction to this is, look, think about the nicest people that you know in real life. Can you imagine that they would become mass murders? If you put them in charge, I was like, no, like the nicest people I know, like, they might, they probably get overthrown or assassinated, but they would not be ordering anyone to be killed.

1:11:13They're just too nice to do that kind of thing. And so when you look at someone who has power and they, and they have all of this wonderful altruistic rhetoric and they had it for a long time and you say, well, they got corrupted. No, much better story is they were always terrible. They're always the kind of person that was going and just telling people what they want to hear, demagogue, and exploiting social ziability by us to gain power. And once you realize that, it's like, hmm, the fact that people are saying this kind of flowery altruistic talk, there's a good reason to go and distrust those people because it's just so common for them when they get power to be terrible.

1:11:49I love it. Brian Kaplan, ladies and gentlemen, Brian, why should people go? They want to keep up to date with everything you're doing. Great question. So all of my books, so the main ones we talked about today were, I don't be a feminist as well as how evil are politicians and voters as mad scientists. Those are all my books are available on Amazon. These books of essays are real cheap, just 12 bucks. I haven't raised the price despite high inflation. I also blog for bet on it and finally I still have a personal web page at bcappin .com Awesome, Ryan, I appreciate you. Thank you. Fantastic being here.

1:12:21It's been a lot of fun.